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conflux

The New York Times Magazine Oversimulated Suburbia
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"Unlike the fictional worlds that flow from the precious prose academies, the Sims world has the feel of real suburban life. It has the same emphasis on money making, shopping, coupling and party throwing. The Sims characters have real-estate fantasies, just as real people do. They have consumer longings. And most of all, they have this desperate need to carve out a place for themselves amid the sprawl.

Unlike people, say, in a traditional Italian village, Sims characters have weak bonds -- if any -- to extended family or past generations, and they feel this intense need to tie themselves to others, to create some local community in which they can be happy. And all the shopping and decorating and party giving and bonding is part of that quest -- the need to create your own roots in a mobile and individualistic world. That doesn't sound so strange for anybody living in modern America. Indeed, it's kind of inspiring. The creative process isn't just for art students and design professionals. It's alive out there amid the subdivisions."

WIred Magazine The Sims Online
"Since online gamers spend a good deal of time text-messaging anyway, Wright's real competition isn't a niche product like EverQuest. It's America Online chat rooms. Like AOL, TSO will take great pains to ease its users into online life: The setting is suburban, the socializing typically takes place at home, and the neighbors can easily stop by on foot.

Internet cafes have sprung up all over Baghdad in recent months, and even in smaller cities such as Karbala, a religiously conservative city 75 miles southwest of the capital. Just last month, the government took another major step, permitting some citizens to have Internet connections at home

Ironically, the game could replace the neighborly interaction it so deliberately emulates. Indeed, The Sims Online promises a particularly unthreatening version of the virtual world Neal Stephenson imagined in Snow Crash, a place people do the socializing they can't or won't in real life. The Metaverse has finally arrived -- and it looks a lot like Main Street, USA."

Taipei Times Gamers likely to shun `the Sims'
"Online gaming trends between Taiwanese and Americans vary greatly, with locals preferring to band together and fight off attackers as opposed to their counterparts across the Pacific who prefer to create a virtual life for themselves."

""Taiwanese players like to play games where they can kill other characters using swords, or band together in a group fighting against others," he said. "First person games, where the player does not see himself and looks at the world as if through his own eyes, are very popular in the US. Third person games, where the player sees his character in front of his eyes, are more popular in Taiwan, Korea and Japan.""

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“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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